You Folks Seen this Panoramic of Area 51 Before?

Hello there
I came across this image of Area 51 and thought it was pretty neat. Never been this close from the outside before. Apologies if its been shown before. I did a search and didn't see anything that jumped out but I may have missed it.
Be sure to enlarge the photo in the link to see it up close.


commondatastorage.googleapis.com...

reply to post by sparrowstail


Very cool image. Notice the massive satellite dishes pointed straight up into space at the far-right of the image? I wonder what those monstrosities are communicating with up there.

yeah i seen that before in the movie close encounters of a third kind. : )

Great picture ... Quite a scattered base!

reply to post by _BoneZ_


Probably satellites that are out in space.

Amazing Photo!
There were Several Roads and Cars passing.
A high Commute for such a private location.
I Also Saw a Number of fighter Jets. (Possible chem-trails?)
Never Seen it before.

Originally posted by VeniVidi
Probably satellites that are out in space.

I wouldn't think you'd need that big of a dish to just merely communicate with satellites in space. TV stations have large dishes to transmit and receive signals from satellites. Those dishes are big because they're passing alot of data in the form of audio and video. Those dishes at A51 are larger than ones found at TV stations. They're communicating with something up in space, and I doubt it's mere satellites.

Besides, all satellite dishes I've seen are pointed at some angle to a particular satellite. Those dishes at A51 are pointed straight up. Kind of like you would find at SETI or some other organization listening and looking for signs of life in space.

Looks pretty much the same as I left it. There aren't as many support vehicles at the "hotel" (middle right of center) and the mounds of dirt (left side of photo) seem to have been moved around more.

They are radar dishes, not communications antennae. They are not pointed upward to communicate with anything. Rather, this is the preferred "parked" configuration when the dish is not in use. This is the EG&G Radar Cross-Section Measurement facility, originally built in 1959 for RCS testing of the A-12 configuration for Project OXCART.

reply to post by Shadowhawk


I'm not sure where you got your information from, but this is an RCS measuring system. And doing more searches on "RCS" turns up similar indoor facilities such as the one I just posted.

Do you have any links to support your claims? Those dishes look exactly like every other dish you see pointed directly above at space in search of some sort of signals.

reply to post by Shadowhawk



Are you positive those are not for communications? Every photograph I took of that area has the dishes pointed in the same direction, and not straight up. It is like one dish for transmit and the other for receive. Also none of the Mojave RCS sites use that configuration. They have the dishes on a scaffolding of sorts and put the plane on a pole.



Those dishes look identical to the dishes outside the now idle Sunnyvale Blue cube. I shot this from a local traffic helicopter.



more recent pano

I put my pano here because that pano chopped off the odd stuff over in the next valley, as seen in the far right of my panorama. That tower is 240ft. I don't see any guy wires on it, but it's about 30 miles away so they may be lost in the haze.

Incidentally, the pano at the start of the thread uses a reflector telescope. That is why you get some odd blur at parts. Those scops are notorious for what the astronomers call coma. I switched to a refractor scope and barlow to get around that problem.

I met the photographer as he was coming down from Tikaboo. Unfortunately I didn't get to stay on Tikaboo that trip because a wicked lightning storm approached. I saw it coming from the first false summit and turned back.

reply to post by gariac


Very cool images. You can clearly see the radar dishes in between the communication dishes. I wonder though, what good would those radar dishes be with mountains all around. Wouldn't the mountains block out any signal from going very far?

I got my information from a number of people who worked in those buildings at Area 51, as well as from various official documents. Below are links to some photos of the facility provided by one of the radar technicians who worked there. You can also find additional information about the Area 51 RCS range in various books including "From Rainbow to GUSTO: Stealth and the Design and Development of the Blackbird" by Paul A., Suhler (AIAA, 2009) and "Radar Man: A Personal History of Stealth" by Edward Lovick Jr. (iUniverse, 2010).

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reply to post by Shadowhawk


Is it me, or does everyone else get those links blocked? They exist, but I can't access them.

reply to post by _BoneZ_


Well aren't they both dishes, just large and small variety. As far as I know, dish size just determines gain. The LNBF determines the frequency.

Regarding the hills being in the way, typical Clark belt azimuth is around 40 degrees, so they could easily clear the hills. As the satellite location is further east, the azimuth drops. Then at some point looking eastward, the terrain blocks the signal. However, these military satellites could be polar rather than on the Clark belt.

Originally posted by gariac
reply to post by Shadowhawk

 

Is it me, or does everyone else get those links blocked? They exist, but I can't access them.

yep blocked for me too

Originally posted by gariac
reply to post by Shadowhawk

 

Is it me, or does everyone else get those links blocked? They exist, but I can't access them.

Something funky with their HTML.
If you go to this page, scroll down to the bottom, they are linked from there. Seems to work.
area51specialprojects.com...

EDITED TO ADD:
Putting a www. in front of those links seems to work too.

reply to post by sparrowstail


Looks like quite a lot of construction work goes on there that's a pretty big concrete manufaturing area or soil processing area on the left perhaps they are cleaning up the soil there ?

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/f7ffa378aa65.jpg[/atsimg]

Radio Telescope?

[5.3] INTERPLANETARY RADAR
* With the introduction of large, powerful dish radio telescopes, astronomers began to think of perform radar observations of the planets. Radar involves transmitting radio pulses and then measuring the time it takes for the pulses to return from a target. Obviously, this requires a powerful transmitter and a sensitive receiver since even the nearest planets are far away.

Radar pulses had been reflected from the Moon not long after the end of World War II, but this was basically a stunt. In fact, when the big US "Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS)" military radars were set up in Greenland and Alaska in the early 1960s, the first time the Moon rose in the line of sight of one of the radars it set off alarms; the designers hadn't factored the Moon into their considerations, and some changes had to be made to ignore the returns from the Moon.

In 1961 astronomers actually performed the first useful radar observations of another world, bouncing radar pulses off of Venus during a conjunction of Earth and Venus. The pulses were in the form of "pseudorandom noise" trains that provided long and distinctive patterns, allowing the astronomers to sort out the returns. The radar studies showed Venus had a slow rotation rate, and that it rotated in the reverse direction of other planets.

In the 1970s, improved radar observations using the Arecibo instrument actually permitted some mapping of gross surface detail on the planet as well, with the radar penetrating the unending thick cloud cover of the planet. This was just a prelude for much more detailed and comprehensive radar maps of the planet, produced by US and Soviet Venus orbiting spacecraft in the 1980s.

By that time, radar was being used to observe asteroids passing by the Earth, leading to the imaging of the asteroid Castalia in 1989. A number of other asteroids have been imaged by radar since that time, and in fact radar observations of large asteroids have been performed into the asteroid belt itself, beyond the orbit of Mars.



[5.6] VERY LONG BASELINE INTERFEROMETRY / THE VLBA
* Along with the development of large radio interferometry arrays like the VLA, techniques were developed to link radio telescopes spanning continents or oceans into interferometry arrays, a technique known as "very long baseline interferometry (VLBI)".

Even before the construction of the VLA, radio astronomers were considering VLBI. The VLA is a "connected element" interferometer, with direct signal connections between the dishes, but for longer baselines direct connections are not practical. Observations had to be recorded on magnetic tape, along with the necessary precise timing information, which required accuracies better than a microsecond. This meant that any observatory participating in a VLBI network had to have recording equipment linked to a precise local atomic clock.

The first experimental VLBI measurements were made in 1967 by several Canadian and American research teams. A year later, a Swedish group joined the effort, providing an intercontinental baseline for observations. By the early 1970s, VLBI observations were providing details of the cosmic jets emitted by distant quasars.

The VLBI pioneers managed to perform some significant observations of radio objects, but the logistics of conducting VLBI were burdensome and quickly exceeded the capability of informal groups of researchers. In particular, trying to schedule observations on multiple radio telescopes at the same time was troublesome, and argued for a set of radio telescopes dedicated strictly to VLBI.

VLBI advocates joined together in the "Network Users Group", which lobbied for a formal and properly funded VLBI effort in 1980 report on priorities for astronomical research. The result was the American "Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA)", an array of ten identical radio telescopes, each with a diameter of 25 meters, scattered across the North American continent. The VLBA was funded by the NSF at a cost of $84 million US in 1989 dollars, and was formally dedicated in 1993. The VLBA provides the highest resolution of any astronomical observatory ever built, up to a tenth of an arc-millisecond.

The VLBA is controlled by the NRAO Array Operations Center (AOC) in Socorro, New Mexico. The ten radio dishes, or network "nodes", are located at:


Kitt Peak, Arizona.
Pie Town, New Mexico.
Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
Owens Valley, California.
Brewster, Washington.
Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Fort Davis, Texas.
North Liberty, Iowa.
Hancock, New Hampshire.
Saint Croix, Virgin Islands.

The baselines between the ten nodes range from 200 to 8,000 kilometers (125 to 5,000 miles). Each node site has a small local staff to handle observations and routine maintenance. The AOC provides central control over the entire network and a dedicated VLBI processor, or "correlator", that crunches the observations from the ten nodes. The AOC also maintains a spares stockpile, and an engineering staff to provide high level repairs or upgrades for the nodes.

Perhaps Naval Space Command uses it to communicate with their mission objectives before they use the star gate next to Jupiter to jump to and attack the incomming Nephilim starships....

reply to post by FosterVS


Well there is no doubt RCS was performed there. But what isn't shown is that particular radar dish used in the process. Helendale and Tejon don't use that type of dish antenna. Of course, we don't know how it was done back in the day. I'm not sure those large dishes can go totally horizontal. And again, why would you use the kind of dish designed to point skyward when your targets will be ground based.